The Butcher's Bill
by storybookknight
Summary: Quarrel was allergic to bee stings, and now Taylor is the Butcher - but the Administrator shard is strong enough to hold off the voices in her head, for now. What will Taylor do, when circumstances conspire to keep her on the wrong side of the law?
1. Parasite

**This story begins in the middle of chapter 21.6, the fight with Butcher and the Teeth. All characters are property of Wildbow.**

_"We're attacking," _I said, and I spoke through the bugs that were near each of my allies. _"Be ready."_

My bugs swept into the building, ruining food, scattering money - but the priority target for the evening was Butcher. According to Lisa's debrief, while Butcher shouldn't feel any pain (courtesy of her twelfth incarnation), the mad cape had _twitched_ a few times when I had used my power at our last meeting. Despite her Thinker power-induced headache, Tattletale had managed to piece together that it was possible one of Butcher's incarnations had been an entomophobe. For our plan to work, we needed Butcher disoriented and off-balance.

Which meant that while I was harassing all of the Teeth? I went after Butcher _hard._

The rain was hampering my ability to collect local insects, particularly fliers, but I had whole _hives_ of bees and wasps that I had brought from home, and knowing that Butcher was immune to pain meant that I could forgo treating their stingers with capsaicin in order to pack them in just as tight as possible.

Butcher had been seated, cleaning her enormous gun. She made it halfway to her feet before my insects swarmed her. For a few split seconds, the black and yellow insects crawled over her body, doing their best to focus stingers in sensitive locations, where her impervious skin was thinnest. Eyeballs and eyelids. Ear canals. The inside of the nose. The tongue and throat. Then, without even taking the time to put on her mask, she disappeared, and a cloud of flame blossomed on the roof of the building.

It was surprising, to see Butcher come out into the open so soon. Tattletale had briefed us on the Teeth's tactics, and their normal mode of operation was to form into lines of battle while members like Butcher and Animos attacked from behind cover. Still, the possibility of Butcher acting aggressively was nothing that we hadn't prepared for. Citrine shouted to the other Ambassadors, and Jacklight, Codex, and Ligeia opened fire, jets of water mixing with orbs of light and a ghostly glow in a rush of metahuman power towards Butcher's location. The geyser threw Butcher into the air, only for her to be caught in the orbit of one of the orbs and slammed back down, through the roof of the building.

I grinned savagely, and sent my swarm after Butcher again. Between the powers of Butchers Three and Six, Butcher had the ability to sense danger approaching and to teleport out of its way, but it seemed that ability had some sort of limit on how quickly it could be used, or Butcher would have dodged the blows.

The next time that she teleported, it was right into our midst. I felt flame wash over me as she appeared out of thin air, her unmasked face red and contorted with rage, her mouth frothed with spit. Behind me, Rachel released her dogs, thousands of pounds of snarling muscle bearing straight for her. Butcher charged forwards, holding her gatling gun like an oversized club, and for a second I saw my own inevitable death, my skull about to be crushed by a thousand-pound hunk of metal swung with superhuman strength.

Then Regent shouted, and one of her legs buckled out from under her.

When she looked up, I could see that her eyes were bloodshot, and her face was puffy and swollen. Spit still frothed her mouth, but rather than being contorted in rage her mouth was open to try and take in as much air as possible.

_Shit. She wasn't flinching because she had a phobia. She was flinching because she has an ALLERGY! And I just stung her in her airways more times than any normal insect swarm would sting her!_

Desperately I reached into a pouch in my costume, beetles and cockroaches working together to place the epinephrine injector into my hand. I was halfway to injecting her with it when Bentley and the other dogs ran past me and bowled Butcher over, worrying and tearing at her arms and legs and dragging her further away from our lines, further away from me. Butcher's eyes glowed a soft white as Codex blasted at her brain, draining her intelligence.

"Back off!" I shouted. "Back! Get the dogs back!"

Even as I tried to make myself heard over the din of Bitch's hellhounds, the door to the Teeth's hideout burst open. Seeing Butcher being literally dog-piled, the Teeth burst into action. Spree started to pump out legions of angry clones, fifteen loud angry bodies a second stampeding towards our battle lines. They were joined by the unpowered members of the Teeth, who had made their way around from the back of the building. Vex erected shimmering barriers of razor-sharp forcefields, Animos shifted to a beastlike form and bounded towards the fray, Hemorrhagia formed scab-swords out of her own blood, and I watched in despair as my route to saving Butcher's life dissolved into violent chaos.

Butcher was dying. And when she did, I was going to have killed her. I would become Butcher XV, host to fourteen sets of powers from Butchers past, host to fourteen insane voices, angry ghosts that would want nothing more than for me to turn on my friends, slaughter them brutally, and claim my place as the new leader of the Teeth.

Before that happened, though, while she was still choking to death? I was going to take out as many of the Teeth as possible, give my friends the closest thing I could to a fighting chance. I reached out with my thoughts, and the swarm answered. Up until now, I had been stinging, biting, trying to distract and incapacitate the Teeth with fear and pain, but not trying to blind or cripple. With Butcher about to crawl inside my skull, I was running out of time to play nice. Hornets dug their way into eyesockets. Dragonflies looped spidersilk around necks. Black widows and brown recluses went for the easiest places they could reach, whether that was the face or the leg. I strode forward myself, using my combat baton to strike the Spree clones that were getting in my way.

Between the aggression of my bugs and the lack of Butcher's firepower, the Teeth were going down easily. Imp appeared out of nowhere, her taser putting an end to Spree's clones. Hemorrhagia flailed, under assault from an unseen force as Othello stared at her impassively. Animos was pinned to the ground by one of Bitch's dogs, Citrine's yellow aura flaring around him and rendering him unable to use his power-nullification abilities. Grue threw a tight knot of darkness over Vex, keeping her from seeing where to put her forcefields, and slowly draining off her power. Ligeia sent firehose blasts of water into Reaver, pinning him to the ground.

I reached Butcher, and turned her over to check her face. It was bloated and pale, her lips blue. Her body thrashed with a giant's strength and an infant's coordination, superstrong muscles trying desperately to generate enough suction to force air through her swollen throat. Epi-pen in hand, I stabbed down frantically, catching her right in the chest. The needle was designed to go through clothes. You could put it right through denim jeans. Apparently, metahumanly durable skin was just a little bit tougher. I turned the Epi-pen around and looked at the bent needle, then back down at Butcher, and felt her convulse one last time as her heart stopped.

I felt mine stop, too.

_An empty space. Two beings, colliding. One sophisticated, deft, almost gentle; a being used to many years with a partner, habituated to trades of shards, pulling the least valuable pieces of itself to cushion where they meet. The other crude, rough, a hoary and ancient thing, surviving the only way it knows how - by seeking out others of its kind and stealing from them to survive._

_The trade is a violent one. Shards break off on impact, to be exchanged and collected. How easy, then, to slip in an extra shard, not broken off on impact but fired, a parasite. Built to siphon power from the entity, to record all of its tricks, and then to make its way free. A millennia later, the Thief would return._

An endless second later, it beat again. The battlefield had similarly stopped for a second, all of the powered fighters temporarily incapacitated for that split second of - something - but Tattletale's mercenaries and Bitch's dogs had pressed the advantage, and the Teeth were being thoroughly handled.

Then Vex screamed. "Shit! Butcher's dead!"

Pandemonium erupted. No longer concerned with victory, the remnants of the Teeth fled, rather than face their former commander in battle. Similarly, the Undersiders and the Ambassadors were willing to let them flee, looking around to find just exactly who had made the fatal error of killing the Butcher. Looking to find me.

I could feel a muttering in the back of my head, a chorus of my own personal Greek Furies, begging me to rip, to tear, to slaughter my friends and allies. I pleaded with that voice to be silent, and for the moment, it was. Not trusting myself to speak, I reached out to my swarm. _"Butcher - or Quarrel, anyways - had an allergy to bee stings."_

I stopped to let that sink in, and heard a low, moaned "oh god, no." from behind me. Brian. A small, distracted part of me couldn't help but feel happy, that he had felt so strongly as to let that slip._  
><em>

_"For now, I am in control. The plan will proceed as previously discussed. We make our way to the Harbor, Cherish makes the Butcher commit suicide, and the Undersiders and the Ambassadors go home."_ I'd hoped to make a difference, to try to redeem myself on the side of the law, but this... this somehow also worked. I might not be able to add to the good side of things, but I would be taking something evil out, and that was... if not enough, it was better than dying while accomplishing nothing at all.

"Bitch?" I asked as she walked up next to me, the monstrous mass of Bentley standing by her shoulder. "Call Tattletale for me? Please?" I hated the way my voice sounded, broken and sad, and I could feel the other Butchers at the back of my mind clamoring for freedom at the sign of weakness. I didn't know how long it would take, how long it would be before my thoughts were corrupted entirely, but for now... "I want to say goodbye."

Bitch didn't say anything. Sometimes she was completely oblivious to the way that people thought; she snapped and snarled at them like her namesake, keeping her distance from an unpredictable and unintelligible other. Other times, especially when people were in pain? She read body language on a completely intuitive level. Today was one of those times. I don't know what she saw, but rather than try to talk or to console me, she just dialed.

Regent, on the other hand, had no such understanding. "Seriously? This is how it's gonna be? You're just going to give up?"

"Would you prefer that I waited until I had no choice but to hang you with your own intestines?" I said, fragments of Butcher's memory leaking into my mind's eye. I gagged a little bit, and Regent took a step back. "Yeah. I didn't think so."

There was a _click_, and from the phone I could vaguely hear a tinny voice. "... Hello?" Her voice was thick with pain and exhaustion, and Bitch switching the call to speaker did little to improve the quality of the sound, though it did get louder. "Did everything go well? No, you wouldn't be calling me just for that. Something's wrong. Butcher's dead? OW! Please, somebody. Stop making me guess."

I swallowed hard. When I didn't chime in immediately, Regent spoke, having made his way to my shoulder. "Yeah, Butcher bit it. Turns out Quarrel was allergic to bee stings."

"Fuck."

"Yeah."

"Is Taylor there? Is she... " There was a pause, like she was trying to come up with a way not to give offense. "Coherent?"

I cleared my throat, trying not to break down crying. "Yeah, I'm here. We're planning on finishing the plan."

"Wait, listen. Don't do that just yet. Answer me this - "


	2. Sporozoite

A/N: I looked at the viewership numbers for this fic and just about went out the same way that Butcher did! I had the last chapter 80% written for a while, and had only really planned on finishing it and putting it up so that it would be out of the way and I could work on the other plot bunnies running around my head. Given how many people seemed to like the last chapter of this one, though, I thought that writing a followup might be a bigger priority. Leave a review or send me a message if you have any great ideas for powersets of previous Butchers! I have most of the holes in the roster figured out, but wouldn't mind ideas for one or two of the rest.

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><p><em>"Wait, listen, don't do that just yet. Answer me this -"<em> Tattletale's voice stopped for a second, and in that space of time my heart must have hammered against my ribcage a dozen times. Yeah, I was steeling myself to get ready to die. To take the Butcher out with me. But even the hint of a reason to hope paralyzed me completely, robbing me of all of my determination. I didn't want to die. I didn't want to go out like this; a quiet suicide in the night, without even the chance to say goodbye to my dad. But I didn't want to become a monster, either.

When Tattletale continued, it wasn't exactly what I had expected. "- how many insects are you controlling right now? As precisely as you can tell me."

I stopped and thought for a second. "One hundred seventy-two thousand, four hundred and... three? I came with about a hundred thousand bees, wasps, and spiders from home, and I kept gathering everything I could find on the way, so -" My voice was shaky, the words tripping over themselves in my haste to get them out.

Tattletale cut me off. "Okay, good, great. That was what I thought. Not the number, but your power." She kept jumping from idea to idea as she spoke, and I could tell from the pain in her voice that she was using her Thinker powers despite having burnt them out the day before. "That was the thing that struck me about the previous Butchers. None of them were Masters. It's... you know how when people get powers, they usually adapt to them? Firebreathers not scorching their lungs, people with super strength not shattering their own bones? You had to adapt to experiencing multiple thoughts, multiple points of view - you can hear through your bugs, speak through your bugs, weave complex patterns, all at the same time, even. It's probably more impressive than the actual bug control."

My breath caught in my throat. "So - so you're saying - "

"Yeah. You've never hit an upper limit on the number of bugs you can control simultaneously. I have no idea what Butcher's powers are like, if they're voices in your head or what, but given that you haven't already started murdering people... how much more complicated than insects can the voices be?" It sounded like Lisa was actually crying. I'm sure if I called her on it, she would just say that it was her headache... but like Grue's earlier outburst of denial, it made me feel warm inside despite the rain.

"OK. Thanks, Tattletale. I'm going to... give it a try, I guess."

"Good luck." I could hear her bite back another sob, and this time it did sound like one of pain. "I can't... I can't stay on the line. Call me and let me know." I hung up.

Everyone was silent for a second, the hissing of the rain drowning out the sound of people approaching. Most of them were giving me a wide berth, with only Regent willing to stand within arm's reach. "So. Skitter. Feel like murdering us all yet?" he asked, his facial expressions unreadable behind his white porcelain mask.

Despite everything, I snorted with laughter. "No, just you, Regent." As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them, afraid he would take them as a threat, but if anything Alec relaxed a little. I stepped away from him towards the Ambassadors, pitching my voice to be heard over the sound of the rain. "According to Tattletale's Thinker powers, this is the first time that Butcher has been killed by a powerful Master. She believes, and I concur, that my abilities may be uniquely suited to neutralizing Butcher's influence." At that there was a murmur of voices, mostly (I thought) from Tattletale's mercenaries and the O'Daly clan. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Grue sag with what looked like relief, and Bitch seemed to settle down a little bit as well, but some of the others didn't look so sanguine. In particular, Accord's employees seemed to be clustered in a small knot and were having a seemingly intense discussion.

After a few seconds, Citrine stepped forward, away from the other Ambassadors. "I hope you aren't planning simply to ignore the problem and hope that it goes away." The well-made mask she wore reflected her expression faithfully, a look of stern disapproval. In the back of my mind I felt a hot surge of secondhand anger. For a second her clothes and skin somehow _dimmed_, revealing brightly-glowing lines of blue and red beneath them, but after a moment of panic I focused and the vision of her circulatory system vanished.

Even though Butcher's influence had subsided, I still felt my hackles go up. Even if I did manage to keep the Butcher completely under control, I still had to play this carefully. There's no telling what effect this would have on our relationship with our allies. "No. We're sticking with the plan; except that we're going to move to just outside the edge of Cherish's range while I make sure that I am in full control. If I start to lose it, it will be easy enough to throw me into the water."

"And should you lose control suddenly and dramatically?" she asked.

"That's what I'm here for." Imp said from right behind me, taser sparking. I startled at her sudden appearance, and many of the others around us did as well, but privately I wasn't completely convinced that her Stranger powers would trump Butcher III's danger sense. Still, her actions seemed to be reassuring our temporary partners, so I decided to roll with it.

With one hand I reached up and took off my mask. It wasn't as if there was anyone here who didn't know what I looked like beneath it after all, and - "This will make sure that my costume doesn't interfere with Imp's ability to neutralize me. Hopefully if I start losing control, my facial expressions will also give some sort of early warning." To emphasize the fact that I was disarming myself, I made sure to hook my baton back to my belt, then took it off and set it on the ground. As I did so I sent out a command to all one hundred seventy two thousand-odd of my insects and moved them as far away from the others near me as I could. I winced mentally as I did it - it would take me a while to build back up the populations of some of my rarer specimens - but in the event that I lost control, I didn't want to be able to use an army of bugs for cover.

For that matter, I could probably get some of the less well-defended bystanders out of the way as well. "Grue." I said, waiting until I had his attention. "Take the O'Daly clan, the mercenaries, the people with minor powers, and have them start looting the hideout." A mental command, and a small horde of a thousand cockroaches or so turned back to the building, grabbing cash and valuables and dragging them to where they would be easy to see. "Grab Butcher's weapons, too. If I do wind up being able to control her powers, I'm probably going to want them." It made logical sense, but the muttering of approval from inside my skull almost made me want to tell him to stop, to destroy them instead.

I met his eyes, or at least the holes in his mask where they should be, and begged him silently to understand.

After a few seconds, he nodded. His voice always echoed strangely from the inside of his helmet every time he conjured his shadows, but this time as he voiced his agreement I couldn't help but wonder if he was summoning shadow for no other reason but to conceal his emotions. A useful trick, and one that made me a little bit envious. Without my mask to hide my face, or nearby bugs to be my voice, I was feeling more than a little vulnerable. The voices in my head hated it.

Oddly, that feeling was a little comforting.

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><p>It was a long walk to the harbor. My friends and allies were surrounding me on all sides, making the trip feel like something halfway between a prisoner escort and a wake. Dakota and Bear, two of Bitch's dogs, flanked me on either side; Jacklight was maintaining an orb of light just far enough above my head that it would prevent me from jumping out of the trap. Between me and the rest of the group were Bitch and the rest of her dogs, boxing me in and making it so that I had nowhere to run to but forwards. Ligeia and Codex were on guard, and though I couldn't really tell, I had to assume that Othello was keeping his mirror-twin's knife at the ready. All told, it would have felt very hostile had it not been for Regent.<p>

"So, your bees can make wax, right? And your spiders can make thread?" he asked, a smile in his voice to match the smile on his mask.

"Yeah, so?"

"So now you've got the Butcher and the Candlestick Maker locked down! Take up baking, and you'll be all set."

I groaned, and he skipped past Bitch to come closer to me.

"Hey, you're not going to make us start calling ourselves the Teeth, are you? Because between that name and this outfit, I'd have people calling me the Tooth Fairy inside of a week."

"Tooth Fairy, now? Really?" I turned to glower at him.

He raised his arms in a sarcastic shrug. "Hey, you're the one who fucked up and killed Butcher. I had, like, half a dozen dentist jokes saved up that I didn't get to use because the fight was over so quick."

I rolled my eyes and turned back to face the harbor, but privately I was still grateful for the distraction, because the voices of the previous Butchers were getting louder.

Keeping them out of my head was something like trying not to think of a pink elephant. Belatedly I regretted having sent the bulk of my swarm away - trying to sort out the minutiae of their each and every movement would have been something else to focus on. As I walked the edges of my range moved with me, and as new bugs entered my range I decided not to send them back out as I had done with my previous swarm. These bugs were mostly harmless - flies, gnats, mosquitoes, ants, nuisances at best in combat - but they were a way for me to distract myself, so I kept them.

Five jokes containing innuendo based on the word 'cavity' later, we were at the shoreline. There was a line of rubbish in the sand; a mixture of colored pebbles, broken bricks, shards of glass, and anything else that the locals could think of that would stand out. There weren't really any warning signs, though. Everyone knew what that line was, and what it meant.

The sight of it sent a chill down my spine.

I clapped Regent on the shoulder, then turned to Bitch. Rachel had been quiet for the whole walk, and I needed to know where she stood. "If I... if I get this wrong - you'll give the order, right?"

"You won't." Bitch didn't look me in the eye, but then she never did that with anyone she wasn't about to fight.

"I mean it. If Butcher takes me over, I won't be me anymore. Or I'll be a rabid me. If that happens, I want to be put down, before I hurt anyone I care about." I kept my hands down, looked to the side to show her my throat. "Please."

"... You won't need me to. But yeah. Okay." She whistled, and her dogs formed a loose semi-circle, all watching me intently. It was the sort of thing that would have been disconcerting had they been normal-sized dogs; since they were practically the size of trucks, it was downright unnerving. The Ambassadors took up positions as well, though with less sentimentalism, spreading out over the remnants of the boardwalk.

I walked over to the edge of the line in the sand and sat, leaving myself just enough room so that if I fell over backwards my head would wind up on Cherish's side of the line. Folding my legs Indian-style, like I was trying to meditate, I quietly admitted to myself that I had no idea what I was doing.

I peered through the rain and the gloom at the group. Without the glasses in the lenses of my mask, everything was a bit of a blur, but I could make out the general shapes of the figures in front of me with the eerie light cast by Jacklight's orbs. After a few seconds, I could see Bitch's dogs glow a pale yellow as Citrine amplified their strength.

It looked like they were ready, then.

I took a deep breath, and closed my eyes.


	3. Schizont

A/N: I continue to be blown away by the interest that people have in this story. Short but frequent updates seem to be how this story is going to go for the time being, but I reserve the right to slow down once work gets busier and the holidays hit. Reviews continue to be very welcome!

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><p>I didn't know what I had been expecting, really. In movies when they showed someone trying to resist being possessed, they would show a person doing battle against an evil version of themself in their mind's eye, or have them get into an argument with the voices in their head. If the actor was talented enough, they might show the character trying to battle their own body, Evil Hand style. Instead, what I got when I closed my eyes was... nothing at all.<p>

At first, anyways.

I sat there for about a minute, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Was I already controlling the Butchers without knowing it? Did the 'transformation' into Butcher just take longer than I thought? I idly reached down and picked up a rock from the beach, then squeezed it experimentally. It failed to be crushed into dust with super-strength, and I could feel my face heat with embarrassment. Just as I was about to stand back up and announce that whatever was going on with Butcher's powers it didn't seem like anything was going to happen right away, I noticed it, the first hint of a thought not my own.

_This is always how it starts._

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><p>It was like being trapped in a sauna with a hidden stereo, the heat and the volume both steadily rising. It was like drowning in a freezing ocean, being sapped of air and body heat. It was like slowly losing the battle against sleep, when you knew the monster under your bed would grab you as soon as you closed your eyes. It was like being deathly ill and fighting the urge to vomit. It wasn't anything like any of those things, but I couldn't think of anything closer. I had always wondered just how much influence the passengers had on us; Now I had the sinking suspicion that I knew, because as the powers of past Butchers blossomed in my mind, they brought uninvited guests with them.<p>

There was no way to relate to Quarrel's power without having a mind that also thought of the world in terms of targets and connections, so when her power was transferred to me, her way of thinking was too, my mind stretching to accommodate the alien logic.

Her predecessor, Red Ronin, had thought in terms of division, separation.

Rhinohide. Leverage. Commando. Ulfserker. Flint. Tripwire. Devil Child. Mongrel. Rotmonger. Forearmed. Lancet. Butcher. Each of them had their own necessary viewpoint, their own way of looking at the world that sat just so slightly orthogonal to human patterns of thought.

If it had been just the shock of fourteen alien sets of thought patterns, I might have been able to handle the strain... but with the powers, came the memories. How to use them. How they had been used.

I remembered immobilizing someone with pure pain, gloating as they writhed on the floor. I remembered the sweet taste of flesh as I tore open my opponent's shoulder with my predatory jaws. I remembered the despair of having accidentally killed Butcher, the pride of having found a way to kill the bastard without getting infected, the grim resolve of deciding to kill rather than to be killed. And time after time after time, the sense of surrender, the slow and inevitable dissolution of self into a being that had only one desire: to become a more and more perfect killer.

And against that wave of bloodlust and violence and despair stood, well... me.

For a little while, I blanked out, or maybe it was that "I" ceased to exist as a concept that made sense - but somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, there was a place where I and my passenger met, and that went up against the fourteen shards that made up the Butcher. It wasn't really like a one-on-one argument at all, but in later times when I thought back to it, this is how I remembered it:

That wave of memories, that collection of power, was trying to tell me that I had no chance of using those powers without understanding them. Wanted me to abandon my consciousness, and to let the Butcher run the show.

I fought back.

The Teeth were born in Brockton Bay? I ran the Undersiders, and we _owned_ it. The Teeth had fought the Slaughterhouse Nine and barely survived? We'd _beaten_ them. Fourteen alien powers? Try fourteen colonies of bees. My power, my viewpoint, just _happened_ to be bugs. What it really represented was _unity__. Coordination. Many small pieces becoming a whole._ That was something that the Butcher needed, something that it had always suffered from.

The Butcher countered.

I was weak. A girl. Prone to fits of emotion. I had been ridiculed by Valefor. I had inappropriate sentiment for friends and family. The Butcher was purer in purpose, more willing to kill, to eliminate the chance that future opponents would be willing to strike back.

To "Me", that was itself a weakness. The world was going to end. What was the good of killing opponents unnecessarily when an Endbringer or something like Nilbog could come along and kill the whole world? Even if the Butcher did manage to survive through reincarnating, what good would ruling over an empty world be? "I" was already striking the right balance of ruthlessness and sympathy - I had the support of some of the strongest parahumans around, and was attracting more to "My" banner. If more capes like Valefor showed up to mock my feelings of sentiment, there were always more maggots that "I" could use to deal with them. In the meantime, that same sentiment that the Butcher derided was an irreplaceable part of the support that "I" enjoyed.

And, if "I" changed too much towards the Butcher, those same friends would throw me into Cherish's range and leave me trapped underwater to suffer an eternity of despair.

The response was... untranslatable, but it boiled down to this:

_All right. We'll play it your way... for now._

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><p>When I woke up, it was to a bewildering array of enhanced senses. My eyes were sharper, my nose and ears more sensitive; but beyond that there was a welter of 'seventh senses' that did their best to twist themselves into methods that could be interpreted by the ones I already had. It was surprising how many powers actually routed themselves through something other than my eyes; while Butcher and Lancet <em>saw<em> the nerves and blood vessels that they targeted, Forearmed's danger sense manifested as a feeling of pressure on the skin, and Devil Child's ability to teleport almost felt like an inner-ear imbalance, a simultaneous shift of gravity in the directions that it would be safe for me to go. Other powers, like Quarrel's space-warping ability or Red Ronin's ability to amplify the sharpness of blades he wielded, seemed to be tamer powers, ones that would need to be evoked consciously.

Idly, I pressed down on the pebble between my fingers, and felt the fizz of Stonesmith's shaping abilities as it narrowed into a stone dart, then flattened out into a perfectly smooth, round disk. I stood, turned, and used five kinds of super-strength to flick it at the bay. Quarrel's powers insured that it struck at exactly the perfect angle. It would have been symbolic, or poetic, if it had skipped exactly fifteen times, but it only made it to about nine before it struck the rusting hulk of a wrecked ship and shattered with a clang.

I turned back towards the shore, and saw a small army of monstrous dogs, with powerful parahumans behind them, all staring at me and wondering if I was going to run forwards and kill them.

"Um." I said, looking out at everyone. "Okay, maybe I didn't think this next part through... how do I prove I'm still me? Uh... Butcher is dead, long live Skitter? Um... crap."

From behind me, Imp cackled. "Taylor, you are such a dork."

As usual, I jumped slightly as she appeared behind me, except with my newfound Brute strength, that meant that I made it six inches off the ground. "Would you stop that?" I grumbled.

Imp's mask covered her face, but as usual there was a sly smile in her voice. "What, and miss the chance to see if you tried to murder me just because I startled you?"

I stopped. That was actually a good point. Though... "You're going to use that excuse to 'keep checking' for the next couple weeks, aren't you?"

"... No, of course not, why would you even suspect such a thing?" She cackled again, and I sighed. Imp pulled a scrap of fabric out of her belt, soaking wet from the rain, and threw it into my face with a wet slap. It was my mask.

"You know, just because I'm not going to kill you, doesn't mean I won't find creative ways of getting -" I broke off, confused. Where had I gotten my mask from? Well, it was as good a symbol of the continued survival of 'me' as any, and I put it on while I waited for a signal that would either tell me it was safe to come up, or tell me that they weren't buying it. When Bitch whistled and the dogs stood down, I figured that was it and started walking back up the hill.

Citrine was waiting to meet me. "I will be notifying Accord of this development. I don't think he'll be pleased." Her arms were folded, and when I got within a few yards, she started taking a few steps back.

I was suddenly exhausted. "If Accord doesn't like the fact that his allies in the city just became exponentially more powerful, and doesn't feel like continuing our partnership, he's free to use the contract's escape clause at any time." I paused, thinking for a second. Accord was a powerful ally, and stood the chance of becoming a deadly opponent. Anything I could do to keep him happy would be helpful. "Please, when you tell him what happened, tell him that I believe that I have the past Butchers... organized."

After a long moment, Citrine nodded. She turned and walked away, the Ambassadors falling into place behind her, a phalanx walking through the rain back towards the transportation that they had left at the Teeth's hideout.

I let out a quiet sigh of relief, and turned to face my teammates. Imp was on the phone with Grue, letting him know that 'his girlfriend was way stronger than he was now, so to be careful you-know-when', which I guess counted as letting him know I was okay. Bitch actually looked a little bit wary around me, which was a little depressing, but after a little while she started to thaw. Regent, on the other hand, was his usual disaffected self.

"So... are we done standing in the rain yet?" he asked.

"Yeah." I said. "Let's go home."


	4. Schizont II

A/N: Thank you to everyone who has left a review, but especially to Lendary and 'Dan', for being willing to fact-check me and make sure I'm thinking of what can go wrong. As a reward, have a slightly larger update than usual! Some bookkeeping notes:

Butcher VIII has been renamed 'Flint', because that's a much better name than 'Stonesmith'.

As someone pointed out on the Spacebattles forum, I am likely to start running out of chapter titles given this update rate, so don't be surprised if some of my chapter naming conventions change.

Also, all chapter titles are brought to you by the life cycle of malaria, one of the biggest killers in the world today.

* * *

><p>Of course it wasn't actually that simple.<p>

There was a lot to do at the Teeth's hideout - cleaning up bodies, gathering valuables, collecting or destroying weapons. In other circumstances I might have exercised my prerogative as the leader of the Undersiders and avoided the clean-up process in order to look like more of a commander, but I wanted to collect as many of the bugs that I had left behind as possible...

And I didn't really feel like being left alone with my thoughts right at the moment.

If that was even possible.

As much as I had boasted to my friends that I was in complete control, the truth was a little bit more complicated. The Butchers were _quiescent_ for now; somehow I'd convinced them that in order for them to get what they wanted, 'we' needed to be an 'I', and that 'I' needed to be one that the Undersiders would recognize. No groupthink. No arguments. _Coordination._

On the other hand... when I controlled one of my bugs, I automatically understood it intimately. How each and every body part worked. What its instincts told it. Sometimes it was complicated at first, but over time I could understand it well enough to send even the most complex of instructions automatically.

The problem of coordinating fourteen of the most bloodthirsty killers in history was that to control them I had to understand them just as intimately. _  
><em>

Butcher had been a psychopath in the clinical sense; someone for whom social shame and stigma was not a concern, someone who had a pleasure circuit in his brain that fired every time he caused another living being pain. His power reflected that mindset, giving him physical strength to dominate those weaker than him, and pain invoking powers to bring down the mighty; over the years, however, the subsequent Butchers had come to a conclusion that I couldn't help but agree with. The strength, the pain, those were just means to an end. The powers of the First Butcher desired _conflict_. To find a strong opponent, and to either prove victorious over them, or die trying, and in the dying pass on the power to a new host, gathering knowledge and skill as it went. One after another, Butchers of the past had carelessly thrown themselves into fights where they stood a chance of dying, going out to opponents that shouldn't have stood a chance of defeating them.

And unless I was careful, the same thing could happen to me. Butcher's powers enjoyed conflict, so while I was coordinating him, I would feel a secondhand echo of that enjoyment. Over time that feeling of reward could become Pavlovian.

It had certainly happened to the first Butcher - he had picked up Lancet by the throat and stopped to gloat, trusting that there was nothing that someone whose only power was the ability to see blood veins through walls could do to hurt him. He was right, but what he hadn't known was that Lancet, who had named himself after a medieval bloodletting tool, had had a second power; the ability to cause blood to seep through skin in an area that he touched. Butcher had bled to death without a mark on his skin, and Lancet had gained his powers. Moreso than the original Butcher, Lancet had been a sadist - in fact, one of the ways that he had driven Forearmed insane, after having been killed by him and subsumed, was to force the blood-extracting power to activate in the middle of Forearmed's lovemaking, so that everywhere Forearmed was touching had erupted in a shower of blood.

I looked over at Grue where he was directing Tattletale's mercenaries, and suppressed a shudder. I didn't _think_ that Lancet's echo - for lack of a better word - could do the same thing to me, but the idea made my gut drop into the bottom of my stomach. Worse, I had the feeling that if something like that ever did happen, there would be echoes that I coordinated who would enjoy it, and I would feel that enjoyment by proxy. My only consolation was that after Lancet's death, his bloodletting power had been weakened far further than his ability to see veins.

As if sensing that I was trying not to think about him dying in a bloody mess in my arms, Grue broke away from the mercenaries and made his way over to me. _"Skitter."_ The relief in his voice was like a bloody gazelle haunch in front of the lion that was Lancet's echo, and only a quick mental effort kept me from turning on the ability to see his veins. As he came close, I held out a hand to keep him at bay.

"No hug." I said quietly, wishing that I had left the mask off so that he could see the pain in my face. "Remember what Tattletale said. We don't know what effect touching me with your shadows will have, now."

He stopped cold. "Shit."

"Now that I can describe it from the inside, Tattletale might be able to give us a more accurate prediction... but trust me. For now, you do _not_ want to risk it."

"Okay." He stood there silently for a second, clearly trying to take it all in. One hand went touched the top of his helmet and then went back down, as though he had wanted to run his hand through his hair in frustration but forgotten that the helmet was there.

I shifted, crossing my arms uncomfortably. "It's not that I don't want one, it's just -"

"No, no, I get it. It's cool." He looked around, and for a second I didn't know what to say. Our last conversation came back to me; the onesided goodbye that I had said to him, the feeling of guilt over leaving him the responsibility for the Undersiders, and the pang of loss for not being able to commit to a relationship in the future with him. I had no idea where those plans stood now - Miss Militia was unlikely to take this as a signal of deescalation, and surrendering as Skitter to Tagg suddenly seemed much more complicated than it had a second ago. Did this mean that there was a chance for a future between Brian and I now? But even if my plans to leave had changed, that didn't mean that the complications that I had already identified would go away. There was still the job, the endless details of actually running a city, the need to appear as leaders, rather than humans.

The silence stretched; I was grateful when he finally spoke up and changed the topic. "We should probably get going. Emergency response times in this part of the city are still slow, but not so slow we can afford to sit around forever."

I nodded. "Would you mind asking if everyone would be willing to meet at my place?" For all that the Undersiders had been willing to declare their trust in me in front of the Ambassadors, it was vanishingly unlikely that any of them were completely confident in me just yet, and out in the open where anyone could hear was not the place to try to reassure them.

Brian caught my meaning. "I'll tell them."

With that, he walked away, and I had about a second and a half to angst over not being able to hold him before somebody cackled in my ear.

"Gah! Imp!" I whirled around as she skipped back, her demon's head mask leering at me.

"That was pathetic. Reassuringly pathetic. Almost... _too_ pathetic. Like someone who was trying to impersonate Taylor would act." She paused. "Nah, nobody with any self respect would try to do that. Gotta be the real thing."

I dropped my head into my palm, the sodden fabric of my mask squishing water down into my eyes. "I'm not sure if you came over here to try to cheer me up or to try to annoy me, but either way it's working."

"Nuh uh. I came over to hit you up for cash."

"Huh?" I responded articulately.

"Double fudge ripple, T. There is ice cream with my name on it somewhere, and you owe me for my silence." _Right,_ I remembered. _That thing with Haven._

I had taken to folding my bills in distinct patterns based on denomination, like a blind person. It was trivial work for a few insects to place a twenty-dollar bill into my hand, and I handed it to her.

"Pleasure doing business with you," Imp said.

I blinked. I guess I had gotten lost in thought, because Bitch, Grue, and Regent were waiting for me over by the dogs. I got up onto Radley's back, and the four of us started the trip home. By unspoken agreement, the ride back was quiet. On the one hand, I was glad to wait until I was warm and dry to start what would surely be an emotional discussion. On the other hand, the quiet gave me more time to think, and to brood.

Forearmed had a corny name, but his memories were nowhere near as happy-go-lucky, for obvious reasons. The method I was using to control him kept enough distance between my self and his traumas that I wasn't weighed down with crippling despair, but between what the Butchers had done to his loved ones and his thinker power, I was having a hard time not sorting everyone and everything around me into different categories of threats. Including personal attachments.

When he'd thrown himself onto the weapons of the Teeth in an attempt at suicide, Rotmonger had been the one to strike the killing blow. Similar to the original Butcher's focus on _conflict_, Rotmonger's power's theme was _decay_, the disintegration of bonds and the fragmentation of the whole. Rotmonger's powers seemed to resent being bound, and I knew from the Butchers after him that his echo had tried to copy Lancet's tricks, causing the things that hosts he disliked touched to wither, rust, and otherwise corrode. It was a useful power, but I didn't trust it, and trying to understand its mindset gave me a headache.

Mongrel had been his rival in the Teeth, and after her regeneration allowed her to outlast Rotmonger's disintegrating touch, the first victim of his revenge. She had been a bestial Case 53, found by the Teeth without a memory on the streets of Brockton Bay. While none of the subsequent Butchers had mutated to the same degree that she had, I could probably look forward to some physical changes, and maybe to having to focus on not behaving according to animalistic instincts. Joy.

Devil Child had actually enjoyed the physical changes; in fact, she had enjoyed most of her time as the Butcher. She had only been fourteen when she joined the Teeth, and had taken out Butcher V through an act of cold-blooded murder when all of the Butcher's attention was on surviving the Slaughterhouse Nine. The combination of danger sense and explosive teleportation was a powerful one, and it allowed her to build the Teeth back up from their near-annihilation, firmly cementing the name of Butcher in the annals of dangerous capes in the process. For all that, though, her power was based on abstract notions of space and evasion; the murderous part of her nature had all been human.

When she was eventually defeated, it wasn't through power, but through guile. A tinker named Tripwire in a rival villain group had noticed that Butcher's teleportation abilities took a few seconds to recharge, and so set up a trap to kill her when she landed. He had hoped that Butcher's powers of possession were limited by range or by line of sight, but despite having been halfway across town, Tripwire found himself Butcher's new host. His powers synergized poorly with the other Butchers, and so he was taken down by the Teeth pretty quickly. Similarly, most of the subsequent Butchers had little patience for traps, so his powerset saw little use outside of rudimentary applications, though Quarrel had used it to design a bow that would stand up to superhuman strength. I, on the other hand, could see all sorts of uses for it, and for a second as I rode through the town I almost wanted to stop and take notes on a few designs.

Flint had been Tripwire's natural counter, someone who could understand his traps' physical structure and dismantle them with a touch. With his Shaker abilities, he had turned Tripwire's traps against him, and brought the Butcher back to the Teeth. His power had some conceptual limitations; it functioned much more quickly on raw materials than on manufactured items, and much faster making weapons than anything more utilitarian. Those limitations had only become more pronounced since he was defeated. Like Devil Child, however, his power was more conceptional than emotional, and seemed to pose little in the way of threats to my decision-making.

Probably the strangest case out of all the Butchers was Ulfserker. An E88 cape, he had gone up against the Teeth several times when Flint was squaring up against Kaiser. Eventually, he had the bright idea to turn his rage-inducing powers on the Teeth, hoping to manipulate them all into killing each other. That part had gone fine. However, though it was a member of the Teeth that struck Butcher down, Ulfserker was the one that inherited the mantle. Perusing Ulfserker's thoughts and memories gave me a chill. Just how smart was the entity that granted the Butchers their powers? Knowing just what had been responsible for its defeat was much more sophisticated than 'find the person that killed me'. Predictably, his powers embodied the concept of rage and the strength it brought. Like I didn't already need to watch my temper.

Eventually we made it to my place. For a few minutes I busied myself with being a hostess, handing out towels and dry clothes, putting a pot of coffee on to steep, asking Sierra to make some food, grabbing food for Bitch's dogs. Perhaps sensing that I wasn't ready to talk yet, Brian suggested waiting until Parian and Imp arrived to hash things out. I was almost surprised at the easy agreement from the other Undersiders, but it looked like everyone else was as drained as I was. Even in an 'easy' fight like this one had been, the sheer act of setting yourself up and getting ready to fight was tiring in and of itself, and that was before having to wonder in the aftermath if your teammate was getting ready to kill you.

I decided to use my position as owner of the base to take the first shower. It felt a little bit like cowardice, but I needed the time to sit under the hot spray, to collect myself, and to finish organizing the mess inside of my head.

Ulfserker's successor Commando was the first of several capes to try the desperate gambit of murdering Butcher from range, reasoning that if they were far enough away and anonymous, then the Butcher's powers couldn't get them. Commando was a military-minded thinker, with automatic proficiency in strategy, tactics, and any sort of military equipment known to man; he had figured that remote-detonated mines on a route the Butcher drove over plus a high powered sniper rifle would have been enough to get the job done cleanly and safely. Despite having been almost half a mile away, Commando was infected. Commando had been the first Butcher, perhaps prompted by his Thinker power, to advocate leaving Brockton Bay for greener pastures elsewhere. While his Thinker powers were weakened in his passing, they were still enough to allow Quarrel - and me, now - to maintain and repair an XM134 'Minigun'.

Of course, it took the powers of Leverage, the next Butcher in line, to actually hold it. Leverage had had an unusual form of super-strength; rather than just increasing the amount of force that he put out, he instead could increase or decrease something's relative mass. Technically a Brute/Breaker rather than just a Brute, he had been able to perform physical feats of strength that defied the laws of physics. His power seemed like it would be problematic. Whereas Commando's power _explicitly _altered (and hopefully augmented) its host's thoughts, Leverage's was more subtle - a sort of narcissism, an idea along the lines of 'all things gravitate towards me'.

Though the earlier Butchers had the highest number of incarnations and the most opportunities to place their stamp upon successive generations, the later Butchers had the advantage of an ever-increasing amount of power to protect them, and by surviving longer took up correspondingly larger parts of the Butcher's collective personality. Leverage went through quite a few challengers before he finally succumbed to Rhinohide. Though thick-skinned, Rhinohide had been sharp-witted, and in her fight with Leverage took advantage of the fact that when your skin is bulletproof, 'suicide bombing' becomes 'homicide bombing'. Unsurprisingly given her defensive advantages, Rhinohide's powers rewarded taking a defensive stance, letting the enemy hit you ineffectively in order to return a devastating blow.

That passivity, combined with the overconfident death-wish that Butcher I was responsible for, had cost her against Red Ronin. She had been confident that ordinary weapons stood no chance of harming her. Armed with the ability to sharpen the blades he wielded to an atom's width, he had removed Butcher's head with a single slice. He had remained the leader of the Teeth for a long while, until his fateful duel with Quarrel - actually not very long ago.

Fourteen sets of powers. Fourteen points of view. Fourteen extra sets of memories, innate reactions, conditioned responses to stimuli that I _would_ be affected by, like a person living abroad starts to pick up an accent.

For a second, I almost wished that I had just let the Butchers take control, living as Quarrel had; one of fifteen arguing viewpoints that only got things done by consensus vote. At least then the 'Me' that remained would have been an untainted 'me', rather than one with my worst, most violent qualities magnified, as I was starting to worry that I would become.

Still, whatever the consequences later, the Undersiders had taken down a nearly immortal serial killer, and noone had died. Instead, we had picked up the equivalent of maybe six capes' worth of power. When I got out of the shower and found that Imp had shown up with her second completely unexpected gift of ice cream in two days, that in and of itself felt like cause enough to celebrate.


	5. Schizont III

We stared awkwardly at each other across my living room.

Each of our "hideouts", for lack of a better word, had its own personality. Tattletale's was the nerve center, where we most often met to plan and strategize. Bitch's was centered around her dogs. Regent's was grand, used to impress. Parian had her _atelier_. Imp's was completely indistinguishable from an ordinary apartment. Out of all of the other Undersiders' hideouts, I liked Grue's the best; while part of it was dedicated to a gym full of boxing equipment, he had that artistic side that made the 'residential' areas attractive, comfortable to live in.

My hideout had two areas - the 'working' areas, where I kept my terrariums full of more valuable insects, and the living space. Though it was technically my living area, Char and Sierra were over as often as not, and honestly did more to keep the place hospitable than I did. Knowing that we were going out into the rain tonight, Sierra had put a pot of soup on the stove in case we came back cold and wet; there was a stack of towels by the door for people to dry off when they entered, and not long after we sat down coffee and tea were ready for those who wanted it.

In any other circumstance, this would have been the sort of thing to make me feel relaxed, at home, in control. Instead I kept seeing nightmare visions of what could happen if the Butchers suddenly got the upper hand. This place was as much their home as it was mine, and I was feeling like an intruder upon it, an unwilling Trojan horse full of bad intent.

I thought that Sierra could tell that something was up; all of us were fairly conspicuously not talking, waiting for Parian to arrive. I almost wanted to tell her to leave, to give us some privacy, but this was something that she deserved to know - and honestly, having one more person around that knew me well enough to be able to vet me was probably not the worst idea in the world.

While I had clean clothes to change into, the other Undersiders were stuck with their wet costumes, so I had used a few beetles to turn up the thermostat. To compensate I switched into some old exercise gear that I used to use for jogging, a simple T-shirt and a pair of shorts. It made for a comical picture - four of the most notorious villains in Brockton Bay, all treading lightly around a fifteen year old girl with wet hair and ratty clothes.

"Can I get you guys anything? Soup? Coffee? Tea?" Sierra asked, seemingly trying to break the awkward silence.

"Soup. And bread, if you got it." Bitch said. She had left most of her dogs (and Bastard) downstairs, but she had brought Bentley up with her. Intellectually, I didn't really blame her for wanting to have a way to use her powers if I started getting violent, but the lack of trust it displayed hurt, probably worse than it should have.

"What kind is it?" Regent asked.

"Hamburger vegetable?"

"Sure, hook me up."

For a few seconds, nobody else said anything. "Grue? Imp? Tay- er, Skitter?"

I shook my head wordlessly. With the knots in my stomach, there was no way I could eat. Grue also issued a polite 'no thank you', probably for a similar reason. Imp, though...

"Fuck that. Break me out some of that ice cream. We're gonna get some hot fudge sauce up in this sitch."

"Um... sure?"

I shook my head as Imp sprung up to assist Sierra in obtaining a 'proper' serving size. I didn't know where Imp put all the junk food she ate. Then again, she didn't have a driver's license, and anything like a scooter that had to share the road with cars seemed like a bad combination with her ability to go completely unnoticed. Maybe she took taxis, or the bus? In any case, she probably made it to a lot of places on foot.

Interrupting my musings, the door opened. Parian entered, looking surprisingly dry despite the weather. Her cracked porcelain mask pivoted left and right as she looked at all of us, taking in the tense mood. "What's wrong?" she asked, sounding nervous. "Did... did things not go well?"

Grue looked up from where he sat straight-backed on the edge of the couch, puddles of shadow roiling at his feet. "No." he said. His face was haggard and drawn, and it contorted as he tried to figure out what to say. "Things... there was... Butcher was allergic to bee stings," he finally managed to get out, his eyes sliding over towards me. "Tattletale was able to tell us that _maybe_ Taylor's power could keep her sane, but now she's out of commission, and we're trying to figure out how we can tell if it worked."

Parian looked alarmed, and I hastened to reassure her. "I feel like me," I said, "Or at least mostly like me. Enough like me that I'm not going to try to hurt anyone."

She stood there for a second, then nodded slowly, once. Parian sat on the couch near Grue, but pulled the bolt of spidersilk cloth back out of her costume and started spinning a gorilla-like creation. I supposed I couldn't really blame her. Over in the kitchen though, Sierra shrank back into a corner, further from me and closer to the cutting block in case she had to grab something to defend herself with. That stung more.

Alec met my eyes from where he was draped over an armchair by the fire, lounging sideways over the armrest. "So... what's it like? Being the Butcher."

I stopped for a second to think. "Confusing? It's... a little bit like being in a crowded room, maybe. Like, I can still hear myself think, and talk, and recognize the sound of my own voice versus everything else, but now there's other voices I can hear too." I stopped, backtracked over what I just said. "Voices like if I focus, I can get them all to shut up, not voices like ha ha all work and dull play makes Butcher a dull boy, I mean."

He snickered. "We'll keep the red rum in the cupboard, then. So, there's no influence on you at all?"

"I... I wish I could say that?" I looked down at my hands. They seemed to have started twisting around each other of their own volition, cracking the knuckles to relieve tension. That wasn't a habit that I had had yesterday. "I think... it's a little bit like peer pressure. When you're calm it's kind of easy to ignore; but when you're angry, or there's something that you want to do but ordinarily wouldn't because it's risky, then all of a sudden people start egging you on..." I sighed. "I don't think there's _no_ effect, but... I still feel like me."

"You move different." Bitch liked the harder-backed chairs, and had taken one from the kitchen. She sat backwards in the chair but facing me, leaning on the backrest with her legs splayed to either side.

I blinked. "What do you mean?"

"You walk different. You used to be a little bit like a bird, maybe. Watched the space around you. Now you're more like Bastard. Walk like you're hunting." She paused. "Doesn't feel like you. Feels like the Butcher, back when we had that meeting."

I felt a chill go down my spine. "Some of that... I'm pretty sure some of that is the super strength. I have to move a little differently so I don't go bouncing all over the place, kind of like I'm on the moon."

Grue looked troubled, and he leaned forwards. "Only some of it?"

"Yeah." My mouth twisted into a frown, and I could feel my back hunching involuntarily, my body drawing inward, pulling my knees up in a defensive posture. "The Butchers... it wasn't just powers and voices that came through, it was instructions. How to move, how to fight, how to shoot a bow. At this point... I'm hoping that's all it is."

There was another silence, eventually broken by Sierra. "So... what now?"

Parian looked side to side. "Well, we really only need to make sure Taylor stays in control until Lisa recovers, right? Then she can tell us if Taylor's going to stay sane, or what."

Grue nodded. "That makes sense. We can take shifts, keep an eye on Taylor through the night."

"Have Regent put her under."

"What?" My head shot up and I, along with everybody else in the room, turned to stare at Imp. Regent looked similarly surprised - though I didn't like the gleam in his eye. For that matter - "Regent, if you controlled Imp to say that, I'm going to use my new super-strength to put you through a wall."

For a second, I lost track of what I had been talking about, and then Imp reappeared, sitting on the edge of my chair and with one arm wrapped over my shoulders. "All me, T. Relax, would you? It doesn't hurt, and this way if you lose it we can have Regent take your body over and frog-march it to the docks. What are we supposed to do otherwise if you do go crazy while we're watching you, sit there and cry?"

That set me back a bit. Aisha's body felt almost feather-light draped across my shoulders, and I knew that if I wanted to I could stand up and throw her into the wall with about as much effort as throwing a pillow off of my lap would have taken yesterday. What could any of them do to stop me?

I still hated the idea. "What happens if I do this and somebody like Valefor gets ahold of Regent? Or just someone puts a knife to his neck?"

"What happens if somebody like Valefor gets ahold of you? Oh wait, Butcher already did. Also, who'd know to target Regent? It's not like we're going to advertise that this is suddenly a thing. Outside of a power like Tattletale's?" Imp continued to drape herself over me. The way her body was pressed up against mine made me suddenly, uncomfortably aware that at least half of the personalities that I recently absorbed had been heterosexual men or lesbian women. I couldn't stop myself from flushing as I pushed her gently but irresistibly off of my armrest.

"It's not like I don't trust Alec... But you at least have the option of waiting until he falls asleep to suddenly become immune. I don't." Even as I said it, I could feel the mood of the room shifting. Bitch was looking at Regent thoughtfully, and while Grue was looking at me his face looked speculative.

"Pretty sure we can't lock you up in a soundproof cage, T. He's just as dead if he falls asleep controlling you as if he does controlling me." Imp grinned like she knew she'd won - probably because she had.

I looked around the room. Parian, Bitch, Grue, Sierra. None of them were stepping up to shout the idea down, and Parian and Sierra were looking less tense than they had a few minutes ago. Regent, on the other hand, was standing up. He walked over to the kitchen. "You got alcohol in here? Liquor, something?"

I shook my head. Sierra chimed in. "There's cooking wine, but nothing drinkable."

"Okay. First off, Skitter you suck. Secondly, I can't cook worth shit, and even I know to never use cooking wine for anything. Third, I was going to get you a drink to help you relax, but actually I dunno if that'd even work with all of the power shit you got going on now."

I thought for a second. "... only if I drink enough of it, I think? Regeneration tends to fix poisons pretty quickly, so I'd have to be chugging vodka or something."

"Well, fuck. There goes that plan." Alec ran one hand through his curly black hair. It was always hard to tell through the mask of indifference that he wore, but something about the way he kept looking at me and looking away made me think he was nervous. "Anyways, point is, you have nothing to worry about. I try to do something stupid like control you full time, Tattletale notices, and Bitch and Grue beat me unconscious. Then you come up and stomp me into the pavement."

Something about the way he made the argument confused me for a second. "Not going to tell me 'you can trust me, we're friends, I would never do something like that to you'?"

Imp started laughing, and Regent flipped her the finger, then grinned at me. "Would you believe me if I had?"

I shrugged. "Yeah, actually. You've had my back a lot of times, and I've had yours. The idea of somebody, anybody but me not being in control of me bothers me. A lot." Had it really only been two days ago that I had boggled at even considering the idea of letting someone control me? I had wondered what it would take, for me to let something like that happen. Now I knew; it was the possibility that someone like the Butcher would do it first. I looked Alec in the eyes, and he looked down, almost looking ashamed. "But in terms of people who I'd trust to do it, you're towards the top of the list."

Alec looked away for a second. Getting his face composed, maybe? When he turned back, it was with the familiar mask of bored detachment. "So, that's a yes, then?"

I swallowed, hard. "Yes."

* * *

><p>Sitting there, waiting for Regent to use his power on me, turn me into a puppet, was one of the hardest things I had ever done. As little as I liked it, the parts of me that I had inherited from the Butcher liked it even less. I could feel my breath coming faster, my heart racing, and I had to keep reminding myself that I was the one in control of the situation. That this was a way to keep the Butcher in check, to keep it from deciding to turn on my friends for fear of being walked right into Cherish's clutches. It didn't help much.<p>

Regent stole a chair from the kitchen and sat in it in a way similar to the way that Bitch had, leaning on the back of it so that he could rest his chin on his folded arms. Unlike her posture, however, his was less about defense and more about focus, putting his head at the same height as mine and freeing his attention from his own body so that he could focus on mine.

I squirmed slightly with embarrassment. "So, um. Do I just sit here?"

His head tilted slightly as he considered the idea. "I could do it that way? Anything where I know what you're trying to do with your body is easier than you fighting it. But I kind of feel like you would get nervous just sitting there and waiting for me to take over."

Reflexively, I shuddered. "I assume you have a better idea?"

Alec nodded. "Yeah. Close your eyes, and take a deep breath. Okay, let it out. Take another deep breath, and... let it out. Great, now keep that rhythm going. I'm going to have you tense up parts of your body one at a time so I can isolate the nerves making that part move. In the meantime, I want you to focus on your breathing, keeping it even and steady. Sound alright?"

I grimaced, my eyes still closed. "Yeah, sure. Let's just get this over with."

"Hmm." He paused. "So, to make sure you're focusing on your breathing, I want you to count your breaths. When you breathe in, count one; when you breathe out, two; in, three, and so on, and start over when you get to ten."

_One, two._ "Got it," I said.

"Okay. So, we're going to start with your feet. Scrunch them up real tight, as tight as you can get them, and, relax. And again, tight as they can go, and, relax. Once more, tight tight tight, and relax." As I got used to the exercise, I noticed that he was timing his commands to be in time with my breathing, having me tense up on the odd numbers and relaxing when I breathed out. After a few passes, I could feel my feet almost getting heavier, like they were requiring more and more effort to move.

Despite my best intentions, my breathing picked up a little bit. I could feel my swarm reacting to the sudden anxiousness, coming in closer to defend, to bite, to sting. It took conscious effort to keep them away, and as soon as I let go they started returning. As Regent started moving up my legs, having me clench my calves and thighs, I settled into the pattern of pushing the bugs away while I exhaled and relaxed, then letting the bugs come back in on the inhale.

"Try and move your knees together and apart at the same time... and relax." _Seven, eight._ "Clench your butt and your hips... relax." _Nine, ten._ "Whole right leg only... relax." _One, two._ "Whole left leg only... relax." Every time, my bugs followed along with the air in my lungs.

By this point, my legs felt like little more than lead weights. I was surprised by how comfortable it was. I had been on edge for hours, suffering through cold rain and pre-battle trepidation and the exercise in staring down the metaphorical barrel of a loaded gun that had happened after; with Regent slowly taking me over one muscle at a time, his powers were able to force the taut bands of iron in my legs to relax as completely as if I were asleep. Something must have shown in my face, because Imp cackled. "Heh. You think that's good? Just wait 'til he gets to your shoulders and neck. First time he took me over he had to wake me up halfway through, because I just about fell asleep."

"... It's not as bad as I thought it would be."

"No talking. Count your breaths." I almost opened my eyes so that I could roll them at Regent, but instead just listened as he started in on my hands. "Make claws, relax. Make tight fists, relax. Jazz hands, relax. Squeeze your fingers together, and relax. Try to move your palms down and up a the same time, and relax. Left and right... and relax. Curl to show off your bicep... and relax." The more my muscles relaxed, the more that I did too. My bugs started settling down to kind of a desultory tension, like they were ready to get up and attack but were willing to wait for the moment. With my attention freed from them I could sort of start to feel Regent's power working on my muscles, like an almost feather-light touch, strongest in my arms and legs but faintly throughout the rest of my body as well.

When he moved up to my shoulders, I kind of had to agree with Imp. It was, to put it frankly, _ridiculously_ relaxing. Which was in and of itself almost concerning. I had thought that being under Regent's power would be like being trapped in my body, wanting to move but completely unable to. Instead, I was slowly losing the ability to want to move. Experimentally, I thought about trying to lift my foot, wiggle my toe. It didn't twitch. I wanted to shudder. I couldn't.

Was this what it had been like for Shadow Stalker? Her body moving to fight her friends, her teammates... and feeling like it was her doing it, the entire time?

My eyes opened, and I stood up. "Finished," I said.

"What's it like?" Grue asked.

I bounced up and down on my toes experimentally, coming several inches off the ground with each movement. "Like trying to fly a fighter jet while simultaneously folding origami and reciting Shakespeare in Russian. Jesus, Taylor, how do you deal with this many bugs?"

Distracted from how my body was moving and speaking without my intent, I stopped to pay attention to my swarm. As usual, my passenger was reacting to my agitation, and bugs were trying to get closer to Alec. He was holding them off somewhat ineffectively, using my power to calm down the closest only to lose his grasp on some of the others. I did my best to help him, showing him how to grab all of them at once and to tuck them back into locations safe from the rain.

He, in his own body, winced, and I spoke. "Yeah. I can move her body, but all her reflexes and muscle memories are screwed up. Takes a lot of focus. Then there's the bugs. I can use her Master powers okay, but without the Thinker power that lets her control them all at the same time... even with Taylor's help it's a Tattletale-sized headache." His body waved his hand, and suddenly I could move again, almost tripping over my own feet before I managed to regain my balance.

"Christ." I wrapped my arms around myself, turning away from everyone else to try to get back in control of my own emotions. It didn't really help that my body still felt great, almost reluctant to tense itself back up to match how I was feeling. "Don't take this the wrong way, Regent, but if you ever do that to me again in anything less than a life-threatening situation I'll kill you."

"Yeah, I get it. It's cool." Through the eyes of the bugs that I had brought back into the room, I saw him stand up from the chair and stretch. "So I guess we're hanging out here tonight? Watching Skitter, make sure she doesn't go all Butcher on us?" He didn't wait for a response. "Cool. Dibs first shower."

With that, he strode into my bedroom. I turned around only to see everyone looking at me. Imp looked a little bit angry, for some reason, and Grue was concerned. Bitch was just watching. More than anything else, I really just wanted to take ten minutes to go somewhere, maybe cry a little bit, and sit and collect myself, but there was nowhere to go, no way to get away from everyone without them freaking out. I settled for heading into the kitchen and grabbing a glass of water.

This was going to be a long night.


	6. Interludes (Vignettes)

A/N: Last chapter was apparently pretty controversial! Thank you to everyone who read it and cared enough to tell me that they were uncomfortable with the direction the story was taking. I'm going to take that people are divided in opinion on whether or not the Undersiders' choice of actions was a good thing to mean that at least I'm keeping the story interesting and unpredictable.

* * *

><p>Taylor:<p>

I did my best to ignore everyone else in the room as the lukewarm tap water slid down my throat. I wanted to just kick everyone else out, to go to pieces, to pick a fight, to do _something_... but I couldn't. Brian, Aisha, Rachel, Lisa... and Alec, had all been willing to give me a chance. Willing to trust that I could keep the Butcher under control.

If they only knew.

It was probably due to the side-effects of Alec's power that I was even _this_ calm. It was surprising, how much influence the body had on your emotions; how the simple act of keeping my breathing even and my muscles loose had given me the clarity of mind to resist the surge of rage and panic that I had felt. When Regent stopped sandbagging and took over my body for real, I had legitimately wanted to kill him. Part of me wanted to blame the impulse - to set my bugs on him, to hit him with Butcher's pain-powers until he couldn't concentrate - on the aspects of the Butcher that were now inside me... but if I was going to be honest with myself, I wasn't sure that if Regent had controlled me yesterday that I wouldn't have reacted with just as much fear and anger.

Slowly I got myself under a semblance of control, turning towards the group with a shaky smile. "Sorry I snapped, there. Not really feeling myself tonight."

* * *

><p>Aisha snorted. <em>Really think it's us you should be apologizing to?<em> She'd seen the way Alec hurried towards that shower. Dude was hobbling. He'd told her before that overdoing shit with his power gave him muscle cramps; but when he'd taken her over he hadn't had a single one. So either Butcher's powers had interfered, or Taylor had freaked out and he'd had to rush it. Either way, in her book that was the sort of shit you responded to with a "thank you", not a "do it again and I'll fucking kill you."

She shook her head and let her power come back on as her brother and his friends all crowded around Taylor, making sure she was okay. _I suppose I can let her off for tonight. She keeps that shit up, though, we're gonna have words._

Not wanting to deal with Taylor's bullshit, Aisha started heading for the bathroom, tracing Alec's footsteps. The door was locked, of course, but shitty interior door locks like that were easy enough to get by with a credit card, especially when you didn't have to worry about people noticing you if you were a little loud doing it.

Like she fucking thought, Alec was curled up in a ball on the floor of Taylor's shower, not even having bothered to take off his body armor. Aisha faded in slowly, so he wouldn't startle. He didn't look up, choosing to support his head on his arms where they were folded over his knees. He could see his whole body shiver and spasm, muscles briefly outlined against the fabric of his suit. "I..._hic_ fucking... _hic-hate_... using my power on involuntary -_hic_- functions."

"That's the thing where it hurts too much to make people shit themselves that you told me about, right?" Imp asked. "Because of, like, reflexes or whatever?"

"Yeah. Had to -_hic-_ keep her calmed _-hic-_ down, though." Regent took a deep breath and held it, trying to get his hiccups under control. "And then she panicked anyways and I still had to _-hic-_ rush."

Aisha winced. She reached into her combat pouch - it was way too badass to be a fanny pack - and pulled out a little orange bottle. She had seen too much shit with her mom to be the sort of person who popped pills for fun, but when she had found prescription percocets in a house on one of her territory-keeping raids, she had taken it, because getting into cape fights without a Brute rating meant that there were days when you needed something stronger than aspirin. She rattled it to get his attention.

His eyes lightened as he looked up at her, but after a second his head fell back against the wall with a thunk. "Fuck. I can't."

"Why not? ... oh." Shit. She hadn't thought about that. He was supposed to be their last line of defense against Taylor going crazytown. Couldn't really do that if he was stoned off his ass.

"Yeah."

"Little Miss 'Prepared For Everything' probably has some over-the-counter shit lying around, you want me to get you some of those?"

Regent nodded, blinking with a combination of exhaustion and water running into his eyes. "Just none of those headache pills with the caffeine in 'em. I'm gonna try to take a nap while I can."

"What happens if she starts trying to kill us while you're asleep?"

"Wake me up. Duh."

* * *

><p>Accord hung up the phone. Politely, as always. Citrine's report on the situation had been... most illuminating, particularly the message that Skitter - or had it been Butcher? - had asked her to pass along. He had made contingency plans for Butcher dying accidentally during the raid, of course. The raid itself had rankled; the short notice, combined with the riskiness of the whole endeavor, had struck him as sloppy, unnecessarily risky. The results of that raid had only confirmed his impression.<p>

Yet even as his mind started suggesting ways to castigate Skitter and that infernal Tattletale for their recklessness, he couldn't help but wonder at his good fortune. His plans for Butcher dying had fallen into three categories - either the Butcher would fall to one of the capes attacking and take over their mind immediately, the takeover would be slow and the successor would use that time to finish the plan as originally set out, or one of the Teeth would stab Butcher in the back and take up the mantle. The notion that Skitter would be able to take the Butcher's powers and control them hadn't even _occurred_ to him.

Accord's mind rifled through visions. Ways to remove Skitter before she gained full control of the new power - no, a waste of an investment. Ways to gain some sort of recompense from the Undersiders for their unpredictable behavior - probably mostly futile, but perhaps a good way to continue placing pressure on them, to gain leverage for future negotiations. Ways to use Skitter's new stature - ah. The twenty-three year plan, formerly so tenuous, was now gaining more depth, breadth. There were more ways, now, for things to go right; ways that formerly fatal errors could be recovered.

If, that was, the transformation had not caused her to become erratic and unpredictable. Much of the plan required a leader that was constantly pushing to obtain more and more power. Coil had had that tendency innately, but Skitter was the sort who only _escalated_ in the face of enemies, having a desire not to lose rather than a desire to win. His plans had taken into account that as an unpredictable ally, he would be able to continue making her uneasy; as his organization grew in power and prestige in tandem with hers, she would be forced to continue making strides in order to prevent him from running roughshod over her.

Now striking that balance could possibly be much trickier. _Skitter_ was not the sort of person to toss away an asset just because they were a possible danger, but the _Butcher_ was. Simultaneously, there were many things that posed a threat to Skitter that would pose very little to Butcher. Trying to simultaneously pose enough of a threat to cause Skitter to react while not posing enough of a threat to tempt Skitter into lethal retaliation would be a thorny problem indeed.

Thankfully, that was the sort of thing at which his power excelled.

* * *

><p>"Talk to me. What have we got?" Director Tagg strode with purpose through the corridors of the PRT building, heading towards the parahuman containment area.<p>

"Hemorrhagia, Spree, and Animos. PRT troops responded to an anonymous tipoff that there had been a cape fight down by the docks. All three were found there incapacitated - Brute-strength zipties and blindfolds." The PRT trooper paused as they reached the hallway and he had to hit the buttons for the elevator. "Looks like the Undersiders' M.O., sir."

Tagg ground his teeth. First the Fallen, now the Teeth. The Undersiders hadn't been wasting any time in defending their turf. "No sign of Butcher or the other Teeth? Reaver, Vex?"

"None, sir."

Tagg was already nodding as the elevator arrived. "A rout, then; or an ambush on an isolated element. All right, let's go interview our prisoners."

The PRT trooper stopped for a second. "Uh... sir? If it's the Undersiders..."

Tagg stopped and blearily rubbed his face with his hand. His fingers found a few welts, still remaining from when Skitter had made his assault. "Right. The Master/Stranger protocols. Good thinking."

A few seconds after a few words into the trooper's radio, pre-recorded words began booming out over the intercom. "Attention base personnel. Master/Stranger protocols are now in effect. Attention base personnel. Master/Stranger protocols are now in effect."

The elevator doors opened, and Tagg strode out into the secure loading bay. The hobbled forms of the Teeth had been containment foamed for an additional safety measure. Clockblocker and Triumph were standing by the side for security. Both looked on edge as Tagg walked up, looking around the room as if for threats. "Problems?"

Clockblocker shifted, looked at Triumph, then back at Tagg. "Not yet."

From inside the blob of foam, there was a muffled cursing. "Fuck you, government lapdogs! You can't hold us for long! We'll be out of your shitty-ass holding cells by this time tomorrow!"

Tagg looked over at the blob of foam. "You think the Butcher's going to waste her time on you?" he called out.

There was a laugh from inside of the foam, a coarse woman's voice. "May ~ be? More importantly, I think she's going to waste her time on you."

"Oh yeah? And why's that?"

"Because Skitter hated your ass. That's the word on the street, right? You outed her, broke the unwritten rules, tried to use students as hostages to ensure her good behavior?"

Director Tagg froze, a chill going down his spine. "What's that have to do with Butcher?"

Clockblocker strode away from the prisoners, one hand slamming against the reinforced walls with a loud smack. "Fuck! Fuck!"

"Thing is, when the Butcher dies, the person who becomes the next Butcher usually tries to find people they hate to kill first. I wonder who it is that Skitter might want to have a few pointed words with?"

Tagg took a step back reflexively, then spun to look at the PRT lieutenant behind him. "Prepare the base for assault. It could be that she's just trying to get into our heads, but I don't think we can afford to take that chance. Clockblocker? Triumph?"

"Yes sir." Triumph stood at attention. Clockblocker was still standing a few feet away, leaning on the wall with both palms and with his forehead resting against the cool surface of the metal, and Tagg decided not to push the point, for now.

"Get the Protectorate and the Wards ready. This could be a rough one. If Hemorrhagia is telling the truth, Butcher could be incoming any second."

* * *

><p>Brian sat and watched helplessly as Taylor stared blankly at the television. She sat with the same sort of distracted look on her face that she used while paying attention to her bugs, but somehow he thought she wasn't really paying attention to anything at all. Even though she was only across the living room, it felt like she was miles away. He looked down at his hands, still oozing darkness.<p>

How could he help her like this? Too many times, she'd helped him pull back together. She'd been his rock, his pressure valve, his shelter from nightmares and bad memories.

_"Oh,"_ Taylor's voice, a croak. "_Oh, Brian."_

Now he couldn't even get close to her. He looked down at his hands as shadow pooled out of them. He could hold it in, keep his focus on staying calm, but the one time that he had tried to get close to Taylor she had stiffened and pushed him away.

It wasn't worth the risk, she had said.

So instead Brian was sitting here, waiting for the morning, waiting until Tattletale would be recovered enough to confirm that Taylor was safe; waiting for her to tell him that his Trump powers wouldn't copy the Butchers' consciousness and leave him a bloodthirsty killer.

He might not be able to touch Taylor, but at least he could stand vigil with her, waiting for the dawn to come.


	7. Schizont IV

"I _think_... you're stable. For the moment, anyways." I let out a sigh of relief, and could hear the rest of the Undersiders do the same. Tattletale sat back in the folding camp chair she had brought, kicking away a shard of glass. The Forsberg Gallery was just as much of a wreck in the daylight, but across the room Tattletale's soldiers had somehow managed to set up electricity and a small television, which was currently tuned to the local news. The top story was, of course, about us. Me. A small blurb in the top left of the screen read: "Skitter, leader of the Undersiders - now Butcher XV?"

"What about Trump powers? Any idea how they'll interact?" For once, Grue's shadows weren't roiling around him in an emotional frenzy; the only evidence of them was the purposeful smokelike wisps that crept out from under his helmet.

Tattletale winced and reached up to grab what looked like a cross between a blindfold and an icepack, then tugged it down over her eyes. It was an incongruous look over her typical purple-and-black costume. "Not yet. I'm pushing my powers to even get as much as I just did. Do me a favor - Accord will be here at 9:30 on the dot, so give me some quiet until 9:28?" Without waiting for a response, she picked up what looked like heavy-duty noise-canceling headphones and slid them on over her ears.

I motioned to the rest of the group and walked away from Tattletale slightly, hoping to reduce her exposure to the noise of our conversation. "All right. Let's talk strategy."

"Really? No 'yay, I'm alright?' No 'thanks guys for worrying about me and staying up all night to make sure I didn't go crazy?' Just straight into strategy?" Imp looked at me, her voice sounding like she was grinning behind the mask. "Guess it really is you."

Despite myself I felt my face flush. "There'll be time for that later. In the meantime, Accord's going to be here in a few minutes, and the PRT is gearing up for a fight. We need a plan." I looked around at the other Undersiders. None of them were looking particularly energetic - they had slept in shifts, and likely not slept well. I, on the other hand, hadn't slept at all. I had the sneaking suspicion that I might not need to anymore; none of the Butchers after Rhinohide had either.

Regent spoke up. "What's wrong with the old plan? We show Accord we aren't intimidated, we act way ruder than he's used to dealing with, and we make him come down to our level."

"As long as he isn't already so irritated with us that being rude to him pushes him over the edge. Remember, last time we hadn't just made a major tactical error." I turned idly towards the street. No cars yet. "He's likely to hold it against us."

"So what do you suggest?" Grue asked, shadow beginning to flicker around his hands. "Play it by ear? Back off if he starts holding his cane too tight?"

"Yeah. And I'm thinking we should give him something to distract him." I paused as I saw Brooks walk over to Tattletale.

"It's nine twenty-eight, ma'am." I heard through my bugs.

"I think I have a plan. I needed to make sure I was in control before I brought it up, though, and now there's no time. Do you guys have my back?"

Bitch snorted. "You really have to ask?" Grue, Regent, Imp and Parian moved over to stand with her, Tattletale walking up a few seconds afterwards. I smiled beneath my mask as I looked at them. My friends. My family.

I had to think that Dinah was wrong. That I had fallen into an edge case where her power broke down, either by interacting with Accord, or with Tattletale, or by becoming the Butcher. I had followed her advice, and now I was a killer; with the memories of hundreds of murders that I hadn't committed, and with instincts that might one day force me to commit a few dozen more. I was no longer, to put it bluntly, the sort of person that the PRT negotiated with.

More importantly, though, my friends trusted me; enough that they were willing to stand by me even despite the Butcher.

There was no way I was cutting ties now.

* * *

><p>At 9:30 on the dot, Accord showed up, backed by his Ambassadors. He had apparently somehow found time to update the new recruits' costumes - while the men were still wearing white suits and ties similar to his own, Lizardtail and Jacklight had adopted dress shirts and pocket squares in green and royal purple respectively, while Ligeia and Codex had graduated from white gowns to gowns of a deep blue-green and a rich brown. It was the masks, however, that were most striking.<p>

Lizardtail wore a mask that looked like a Celtic knot, the eyes and mouth almost obscured by vaguely reptilian coils. Judging by the profiles that Citrine had given me earlier in the week, his name was 'Laird', so it was possible that the Celtic influence was deliberate. If I was recalling correctly, he had been a surgeon before joining Accord; did that have an influence on Accord's choice of powers for him? If so, then I couldn't see the connection for 'Kurt', who had been a head chef before becoming Jacklight. I was a little bit surprised by his mask; I had expected something like a jack-o-lantern, but instead he wore a jester-like mask that wouldn't have looked out of place on a jack-in-the-box.

By their skin tones, Ligeia was 'Kyesha' the former restauranteur, and Codex the contract lawyer 'Pam'. Had I met them a year ago, I probably would have been intimidated by them - they were beautiful, polished, experienced professionals, while I had been a gawky high school student. Now, despite their beautiful conch-shell and origami-like masks, I was the one intimidating them. They didn't falter or flinch - probably didn't dare, with Accord there to see it - but I could tell by the defensive way that they held themselves that they were uncomfortable.

"Accord." With the four new recruits behind him, plus Citrine and Othello, he was definitely making a show of force. My palms itched with the desire to reach down and reshape the debris on the floor of the Forsberg Gallery, to turn it into a weapon, make my own show of force. I suppressed the urge. We weren't actually looking for a fight... and I wasn't sure that those impulses were entirely mine.

"Skitter." Accord surveyed me coolly, one hand on the grip of his weaponized cane. "It... _is_ still Skitter, I trust?"

Out of habit, I amplified my voice with thousands of insects, the susurrus reverberating through the great hall of the Forsberg Gallery. "Yes." The newer Ambassadors shifted slightly, trying to maintain their composure, and I smiled behind the mask. "I have the echoes of the Butcher firmly under my control."

"Congratulations are in order, I suppose." He said it coolly, and the mask that mimicked his facial features frowned. "Nevertheless, I find myself... displeased with the results of our inaugural collaboration."

Tattletale snorted. "Displeased? With Skitter suddenly picking up a whole bunch of firepower? Get real." She shot him a look from her camping chair, which she had moved to behind us.

Accord paused to get himself under control, his hand tightening on the head of his cane, and I suddenly realized that Tattletale hadn't actually been listening during the conversation where we agreed to take things a little bit easier on the rudeness. "It would be polite to stand, when a guest arrives."

It looked like Tattletale had a response to that, but I decided to intervene. "You'll have to excuse Tattletale. She has a power-induced migraine from insuring that I - and your Cauldron-born Ambassadors - were free from mental contamination."

"Ah. I... suppose I can sympathize with that. Nevertheless, it would be better if she were to remain quiet for the moment. I would rather not terminate our alliance by murdering her just yet."

I looked from him to Tattletale. "I trust Tattletale's judgement. If there's something important that needs to be said, she's going to say it. For example, on the subject of your supposed displeasure." I let my bugs buzz a little louder, while I kept my voice saccharine sweet. "Please. Elaborate."

He didn't seem particularly intimidated by the show of force, but it drew his attention away from Tattletale. "Your plan for dealing with the Teeth was unnecessarily risky. It relied upon too many variables, too many unknowns. And it failed." He gestured towards me with an open hand. "Or are you going to tell me that this was an _intended_ result?"

"No-one's plans succeed every time, Accord, not even yours. I shouldn't have to tell you that. The important thing is that when our plan failed, it failed gracefully. Tattletale knew that a powerful enough Master stood a chance of being able to control the Butcher, which is why I took point. The result may have been unintended," I said, slamming my fist into the palm of my hand with a superhuman strength-enhanced _crack_ for emphasis, "but I certainly wouldn't call it disappointing."

"It was risky. If you hadn't succeeded, or if someone else had dealt the deathblow..."

"It was the Undersiders taking that risk, not you, and not your Ambassadors."

"Please don't interrupt me." He shut his eyes in apparent displeasure, metal shutters closing in the eyes of the mask.

"Please don't talk to me like I take orders from you." I raised a hand and gestured out the glassless window at the city. "This is the Undersiders' city, and you are a guest here, free to leave but subject to our rules for as long as you choose to stay. It got that way because we took risks, and the right risks at the right time." I took a deep breath. "If you're uncomfortable with that level of risk, then _diversify_."

His eyes shot open, and he stilled. Behind him the Ambassadors tensed, as if expecting the order to attack. "I beg pardon? I'm afraid I don't follow."

"You're originally from Boston. I assume you still have contacts there, a way to regain power and territory? Right now the Teeth are there, greatly weakened; Blasto has recently been killed by the Slaughterhouse Nine; the Undersiders are familiar with the Empire Eighty-Eight and you and the Ambassadors have intel on the Chain Gang." I gestured over towards the television. "In Brockton, on the other hand, the PRT is gearing up to fight the Butcher." A quote tickled my brain from a book that I had never read, and I suddenly realized that it was in part the Thinker power of Butcher X that was suggesting this course of action. "'A general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend, and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.'"

"Sun Tzu." Murmured Accord. His fingers tapped the head of his cane, as if in thought. "Do you believe that in leaving Brockton to attack the Teeth, the PRT will think that you have lost control of yourself to the Butcher?"

"I think it will keep them wondering, yes. I think that Tattletale and the other Undersiders will be able to defend themselves when I am out of town, particularly if Citrine and another Ambassador stayed with them, and I think it will put pressure on the Boston PRT to ask for help and remove resources from here. Probably Clockblocker, maybe Vista or Kid Win. It's also possible that a few of the independent villains in Boston would be open to joining the Undersiders."

Accord looked intrigued. "And in return for helping me regain lost territory and acquire more, you would claim some of the reclaimed territory yourselves, I assume?"

I shrugged. "Boston is a much bigger city than Brockton Bay. I somehow doubt that any seven parahumans, even you and your Ambassadors, could hold it entirely on their own. I think you would find the amount of territory that we took reasonable. Especially given that once we have Boston and Brockton Bay as bases of operations for Massachusetts and Connecticut, there are plenty of other places to expand to, should we feel the need."

"And if your plan for managing crime in Brockton Bay is as effective as I think it will be, eventually we won't need the full force of the Undersiders here to defend it all the time." Tattletale cut in, doing her best to sit up straight. "I haven't had the chance to turn the full force of my Thinker powers on it, make sure it's legit, but we're willing to at least consider implementing it. If you took Boston back, well, the same thing might apply there."

She looked to me for confirmation, and I nodded. "My whole reason for staying with the Undersiders was because I felt like I could make a difference, and I didn't really care if I had to break the law to make that difference. You obviously feel the same way, or you wouldn't have spent so long putting a document like that together."

"You're quite right." Accord nodded once, sharply, as if coming to an internal decision, and I could see the Ambassadors relax slightly. "So, an amendment to our agreement, then? The Undersiders assist me in retaking Boston and agree to implement some set number of my plans, and in return gain the continued support of myself and the Ambassadors, and territory in Boston, and other cities that we take jointly going forward?"

I shook my head. "We assist you in retaking Boston in exchange for territory in Boston and support in Brockton Bay, and for making sure that the Teeth and the E88 get put behind bars. Our implementations of your plans are going to be completely our decision, not part of any deals. If we do it, it'll be because we think it's a good idea, and no other reason."

"You're not really promising anything." Accord said.

"So? It's still the best chance you have of seeing any of your plans happen."

There was a long pause. "Very well then." He extended his hand towards me to shake. I took it gently, mindful of my increased strength. "In that case, I look forward to our continued partnership."

* * *

><p>As soon as Accord left, Parian leaned against her cloth golem with a long sigh, and Tattletale collapsed back into her chair so hard that Brooks had to catch her to steady her. Tattletale turned to look at me. "Good work. I'm gonna pass out now, kay?"<p>

"Yeah. Go ahead." With that, she put on the blindfold and earmuffs and sagged back into the chair. Brooks and Pritt started putting together what looked like a stretcher to carry her away, and I winced in sympathy.

"Sooooo... Boston? What the fuck, Skitter?" I turned. Imp was standing with her hand on her hip. "You couldn't have told us about that, like, at all?"

I sighed. "Would you believe me if I said I just came up with the idea five minutes ago? It was a Thinker power thing."

"Hey, Parian. Can you make us, like, a couch?" Regent asked, ignoring our discussion completely. "I'm wiped."

"Are you sure you want to be that far away?" Grue asked. "And alone with the Ambassadors..."

"I need to get used to my powers... and right now if I'm in the field, then you're kind of limited in how you can use your darkness. I want to buy you guys some time to breathe."

Bitch frowned. "Who are you taking with you? You'll need someone to watch your back."

I thought about it for a second. "Grue's going to have to be in charge of Brockton while I'm gone. Tattletale's out of commission, and her setup is here anyways. Parian has responsibilities in Dolltown. You have your dogs, though you have people who can take care of them while you're gone, now, so it'd be an inconvenience instead of a true reason not to bring you. If Regent came, we might be able to 'recruit' a few of the Teeth that are acceptable targets. And Imp can leave without anybody knowing for sure that she's gone, because of her power. So maybe Imp, Regent, and you? Assuming that Accord was willing to leave you guys with, say, Citrine, Jacklight, and maybe Ligeia or Codex for a heavy hitter?"

Regent sat up from the 'couch' that Parian had created, looking attentive. "Really? You want me to control a few of the Teeth? I thought you were, you know, against that sort of thing."

"Let me put it this way: Reaver is a murderous asshole. Vex once set up a gauntlet of razor forcefields in front of a burning building, just so she could watch and laugh as people tried to escape. Cadmus has sicced his serpents on civilians so he could get away while the heroes were saving them. I wouldn't do it to Wicker Man or Bonnet, they're just kids... but the other ones are fair game."

Imp sat down next to Regent and threw one arm over his shoulder. "Guess you're moving up in the world!"

I looked around at the Undersiders. "Look. We're all exhausted. Go home, get some rest. We'll deal with Accord and Boston tomorrow."


	8. Tophozoite I

A/N: We're back, baby! Now that I'm more or less finished with Dragon Age: Inquisition, my writing juices are recharged and ready for action! If you like this story, you might also want to check out something new I've been working on: Brockton Bays' Gamer, a Worm / The Gamer crossover where Han Jee-Han is the main character.

* * *

><p>Boston was just a little bit bigger than Brockton Bay.<p>

It wasn't just that the buildings were taller, or that the downtown was more densely packed - both of which were certainly true - so much as the fact that the entire city was teeming with people. I had grown up by the Docks; as one of the more industrial sections of town, it wasn't exactly packed with people to begin with, and then there had been Bakuda, Leviathan, the Slaughterhouse Nine, and Echidna. Compared to a ghost town like Brockton, Boston was practically an anthill.

Luckily, Accord had found us a place that was somewhat out of the way of the throng. Rather than 'inelegantly' making us stake out the Teeth's hideout from a nearby rooftop, Accord had simply rented out some empty office space across the street. I had no doubt that he planned to use the space once we were done and turn it into a restaurant or a software development company or something else obscenely profitable.

Rather than risk being spotted from the street, we had set up shop in a room towards the center of the building without any windows. In the end, after some discussion with the rest of the Undersiders, the group had decided against having Bitch travel with me to Boston. With Citrine, Codex, and Jacklight remaining in Brockton, not having Bitch around as a deterrent against treachery was too great a risk. It was probably just as well - the room was already pretty full with just the six of us who were in it, and adding in Bitch and her dogs would have left no room for oxygen.

As it was, people were still packed pretty close to each other, though Regent and Imp didn't look like they particularly minded being practically in each others' laps. Everyone except for me was crowded around a table pushed against one wall. After some experimentation, I had managed to use Flint's powers to create a cutaway model of the Teeth's hideout; inside it, I was controlling my bugs to mimic the positions of each of Teeth. Ligeia - Kyesha - had helpfully given me a few bottles of nail polish to make the bugs stand out more, but the size of the bugs and the model meant that the Ambassadors had to cram in shoulder-to-shoulder with the Undersiders in order to get a good look.

A year ago I would have been petrified of giving orders to a group of people like this. Now, I was mostly just irritated that Imp was whispering to Regent instead of paying attention. "Okay. Right now the Teeth are busy licking their wounds, so we have an opportunity to hit them while they're still recovering. Our priority targets are the remaining powered members of the Teeth - Reaver, Vex, Cadmus, Snowblind, Wicker Man, and Bonnet. Of those, the ones to take out first are probably Cadmus and Vex. Cadmus can send his summoned snakes under most of Vex's razor fields, and if Vex and Snowblind can get both of their Shaker powers onto the same area, we'll be dealing with razor fields that we can't see. Othello? Imp? You two are going to be sneaking in ahead of the rest of us and tazing Cadmus and Vex before they can get their powers off." Diving into the Butchers' memories to develop profiles on her teammates' powers hadn't been fun - it felt a little bit like watching a snuff film, and gave me the uncontrollable urge to bathe when I was done - but it had been useful. Beyond just knowing what we might be up against, I had also discovered that Butcher had been the one to handle the Teeth's finances. Even despite her headache, Tattletale had smiled like a shark when I handed her the list of account numbers and passwords.

"Dibs on Vex!" Imp said, shooting a look at Othello as if daring him to disagree. His black-and-white mask remained impassive, though, and he just nodded in agreement.

I turned back to the model. "The main challenge with the other four will be keeping them from just cutting and running. Reaver's Mover powers make him hard to pin down, Snowblind's blizzards slow you down and are hard to see through, Wicker Man is tough to stop without a lot of firepower, and Bonnet has that pepper spray power that makes her a pain in the ass at close range." I looked at the group, then back at the model of the building. "I can take any one of them, really, or even all four together, but there are enough unpowered soldiers in the building that I might not be able to get through all of them before one of the powered Teeth gets away. Regent, Ligeia, that means you're on doorway duty. Anyone who tries to leave the building? Trip them up, spray them, knock them down. Lizardtail, you're with them. Keep them safe, and try to keep any of the Teeth from dying unnecessarily."

Regent put his hands behind his head in an exaggerated motion. "So I get to hang back and fuck with people while you do all the work? Awwww! You _do_ love me!" I noticed with an internal smirk that Ligeia almost looked startled by Regent's shocking - by Accord's standards - show of disrespect.

I pointedly ignored Regent, and tilted my head at Ligeia. "What about you, Ligeia? Lizardtail? Any problems?" Ligeia shook her head in negation.

Lizardtail leaned forward, taking a closer look at the model of the Teeth's lair, then nodded decisively. "Well, it's not one of Accord's plans, but I think it'll work, especially if we use one of the vans for cover."

I gave him a toothy grin. The effect was unfortunately hidden by my mask, but I think my body language got the message across. "_So_ glad you approve. Anyways, right now I'm setting up a few tripwires and traps in the Teeth's building. I'm sure Reaver and Vex warned the rest of the Teeth about the tactics I used in Brockton Bay so I'm being a little bit more subtle about things this time around, but there's still a chance the Teeth could notice what I'm doing, so there's no time to waste. Othello and... anyways, go ahead whenever you're ready." For a second I felt like there was someone else I was supposed to be giving orders to, but it didn't seem very important, so I stood up and started heading for the first floor.

Through the window in the downstairs door, I could see the front of the Teeth's hideout, a nondescript apartment complex which was occupied almost exclusively by members of their gang. It was a little bit too far for me to be able to pick out circulatory systems through the wall, but I could see the interior of the building quite easily through the eyes of my bugs. Apparently, that was enough for Devil Child's teleportation power, because I started feeling the slight pull of a gravitational imbalance, as though I were simultaneously standing on flat ground and on the deck of a tilted ship. I focused the teleport on what looked like a lounge area, maybe a rec room; Reaver was in there watching television, and I wanted to take him by surprise before he could get himself up to speed.

The memories of the Butcher had all sorts of 'helpful' suggestions for dealing with him. I could grab him by the neck with one hand and reshape the wall into spikes with the other, then throw him into it; I could take Red Ronin's katana and use it to slice through his hamstrings, I could even just peg him in the eye with a superstrength-thrown dart from where I stood right now.

I had prepared for the slew of murderous impulses, though, and I was... _fairly_ confident that I would be able to just warp in behind him and hit him in the back of the head with a blunt object. That actually reminded me - I reached out to the banister of the stairwell and, with a thought, reshaped the steel into something vaguely resembling a club, much heavier and sturdier than my usual police baton.

Othello turned to look at me, his black-and-white mask somehow managing to convey a disapproving expression. "This is technically Accord's building, you know. It would be polite to ask before you start destroying his property."

"Yes. That cheap-looking railing would totally have fit in with his usual decor schemes," I deadpanned back. Internally, though, I was cringing. The Butcher, of course, had reshaped whatever scenery she wanted, and anybody who told _her_ that she was being rude got broken to match it. Would I have damaged private property like that a week ago? Whether or not I would have, it wasn't the sort of thing that I could afford to look weak on in front of the Ambassadors. "If he's really that concerned about it, he can send me a bill."

"Careful, there. Say enough things like that and he just might do it." I had to admire the workmanship on Laird's Celtic-knot mask as it managed to mimic his smile. The segments of the lizardlike coils almost looked like they were slithering over his face. "He'll probably have it itemized and notarized, even."

I laughed. "First of all, I said he could send me the bill, not that I'd actually pay it. Second of all, leaving aside that it's impossible for either of us to go to a small claims court, where does a supervillain find a notary public?"

"I'm a notary." I turned to look at Ligeia, who had her hand raised to about the level of her eyes. "It's pretty easy to become one in Massachusetts, actually, and it was useful to Accord..." her voice trailed off slightly as Regent and I kept looking at her.

"Huh." I suppose I probably should have expected that. I shook my head and settled back down to business. "Othello? Is your doppleganger in position? I'm running out of places to set up deadfalls and tripwires covertly. Pretty soon I'm going to have to start being a little bit more obvious with what my bugs are doing, so things could get heated more or less any second." Frankly, I could see why previous Butchers had rarely used their Tinker power. When you're nearly invulnerable and are strong enough to carry around and effectively aim anti-tank weaponry, the ability to set up exceptionally clever snares and tripwires is almost superfluous. With my ability to stealthily manipulate spider silk with my bugs, though, it was downright useful. I had done simple things like tie my opponents to objects before - now I knew that if I set up a fulcrum _there_ and a counterweight _there _I could use one victim's body weight to send a cord whipping across a room at neck height and hopefully back people into another tripwire _there..._

Othello nodded, so I started being less subtle. Bugs crawled into shoes, into holsters, jamming themselves suicidally down the barrels of guns and absconding with peoples' phones when their backs were turned. Part of me, and I think I knew which part, honestly wanted to just skip straight to the action and start busting heads, but I suppressed the impulse. I'd survived this long as Skitter by being careful and methodical and by setting the stage for my actions ahead of time whenever possible, and I wasn't going to throw that out just because I had an excuse to act like Alexandria and beat up a room full of thugs while ignoring their retaliations like I had wanted to do since I was eight.

Sure enough, someone saw my bugs moving around and screamed. I turned to the group, said "Go!", and then I let my internal sense of balance finally shift. Teleporting felt a little bit like falling down a well. There was a brief moment of weightlessness, a sense of motion-but-not-motion, and then a _whumph_ of flame as the kinetic energy of my 'landing' was transmuted into heat. I winced a little bit as the puff of flame roasted most of the bugs that I had been using to survey the area. It was a potential liability in the way that my powers interacted that I had yet to find a perfect remedy for. Still, I had been planning for it - that was why most of the bugs that I had sent to this room had been hardy, replaceable species like cockroaches, and why it was that even as I swung my makeshift club at the back of Reaver's head, all of my bees and wasps went to the _other_ rooms in the building.

The teleporting had necessitated a wardrobe change as well. Up until a few days ago, I had been making changes to my costume to allow for plenty of loose folds that could be used to anchor hidden bugs. Unfortunately, dangling fabric tends to catch on fire when you ignite the atmosphere around you. (So did dangling hair; only the fact that I'd had it tucked under the cowl of my mask had saved my last physical reminder of my mother.) Luckily for me, Parian was literally superhumanly talented with a needle and thread. I saw myself teleport into existence through the eyes of my surviving bugs; a slim figure in skin-tight armor, arms and legs tightly corded with muscles that had appeared almost overnight, courtesy of Mongrel's regeneration and self-alteration powers. I had rejected the idea of adopting Butcher's haphazard design scheme, but I wanted to keep as much of her useful equipment as possible, which meant that as far as my new costume had a 'theme' now, it was weapons and weapon-related accessories. I had a fireproof holster on the back for the bow and a fireproof scabbard on the hip for the sword; rounding out the weapon collection was a pistol on the other hip, several knives in shoulder harnesses and in boots, and a multitude of pouches for silk line and other tools. Since weight was no longer an issue, I had added armor plates in strategic locations. When you added in the insectlike mask and copious amounts of black and grey paints, the overall effect was somewhere between SWAT member and soldier ant - androgynous, efficient, and lethal.

The fact that I knocked Reaver out with one swing of my impromptu truncheon only added to the effect.

All around me the building erupted with screams of panic and anger. The unpowered members of the Teeth that had been watching television with Reaver scrambled and ran, shouting variations on "It's the Butcher!" and "It's the bug-girl!" I let red rage boil out from somewhere that felt like the pit of my stomach and pushed it into the atmosphere around me; almost immediately, they turned back to attack me, their faces contorted with rage, too angry to do the smart thing and flee.

Knocking them out without killing them was only slightly harder than childishly simple because most of my ingrained habits - whether from before I picked up super-strength or from the memories of the Butcher - were based on the premise of hitting people as hard as possible. It took an uncomfortable amount of mental effort to pick them up by shirts or belts and fling them into walls - spreading the force of impact across their whole body - instead of just hitting them in the face so hard their skulls shattered. A few of them managed to actually make contact with fists and knives, but between my armor and Rhinohide's durability, I didn't even feel a scratch.

Upstairs in one of the private rooms, a large swath of my bees fell at once, briefly reporting feelings of intense cold and wet before dropping out of the air torpid, or dead. I let gravity shift and teleported into a fierce indoor blizzard, the snow sizzling as it absorbed the trademark flames. In her all-white costume, Snowblind was practically invisible, so I focused power to my eyes and watched her blood vessels appear in sharp relief. From Butcher's memories, I knew that most people trapped in one of her blizzards had trouble staying upright, but I strode toward her implacably, using Leverage's mass alteration powers to keep the wind from sliding me around on the layer of ice that was appearing on the floor. She shrieked, the blood draining out of her face (which was interesting to watch, through the lens of Lancet's power.)

She turned to run.

I hit her with pain.

It was a reflex, the sort of thing that Butcher did all the time to people who weren't 'worth her time'. I'd achieved similar results with bullet ants, for that matter. But this was the first time I'd felt _satisfaction_ watching someone fall to their knees and scream in agony. I almost immediately stopped using the power, and felt like throwing up when the voices in my head felt disappointed. In any case, I didn't need to use it longer - her stumble had given me time to catch up to her and cuff her on the back of the head with an open palm. She slumped to the floor, out like a light.

Choking down my revulsion and guilt, I stepped out into the corridor only to see a bogeyman of wood and bone barreling down the corridor towards me. Wicker Man had encased himself in his organic armor, pulling it in tight to his body so that he could fit inside the narrow hallway and to keep the bees and hornets away from his skin. I crossed my arms in a defensive posture as his right arm shot out and extended, the small wooden pieces scaffolding out to add range to the blow in a maneuver that was oddly reminiscent of those Looney Tunes boxing-glove-on-a-spring devices. Even with Leverage's power, I knew the hit would be heavy enough to send me flying down the hallway, so rather than just blocking I decided to catch. I bear-hugged the brambled mass of his arm, paying no mind to the shards of thorn and bone digging into my skin. Channeling Rotmonger's powers made the organic tissue I was touching turn brittle and weak, so when he tried to shake me off of his 'arm' by bashing me into the wall, I was able to rip it off of the rest of his body instead. I threw the mass to the side as it reverted to normal scrap wood and cow bones, and started punching my way through the rest of his wooden armor. "Just! Give! Up and surrender already!" I shouted in frustration.

"I surrender I surrender!" The words came out of his mouth panicked, and I stopped with my fist held in the air in surprise. His exoskeleton fell away to reveal a scared-looking kid with dark hair, tattoos of birds and brambles running up his arms.

"Why didn't you do that to start with?" I asked.

"It was an option to start with?" He said, shaking slightly. I could see the insectoid lines of my mask reflected in the depths of his wide, terrified eyes. "I mean, you're the freaking Butcher. I thought it was kill or be killed."

"Not quite," I said, and focused on my bugs, using them to broadcast my voice across the whole complex. "This is Skitter, formerly known as the Butcher! Your capes are down or have run away. Surrender! Lay down your weapons, and lay down on the floor." Almost as soon as I said it, those gangsters not strung up by their heels in tripwires or smashed and soaking wet in a pile by the front door began sagging to the ground in defeat. I mentally grinned to myself. I had taken out three capes in under three minutes and I hadn't even broken a sweat. Othello had gotten Cadmus, and... somebody had gotten Vex, so the only one who could possibly have gotten away was Bonnet - and I was pretty sure she was in that pile by the front door. Five, probably six out of six Teeth was a pretty good start to my campaign in Boston. The only question now was, what to do with them now that I had them beat?

I looked at the kid at my feet. "So. Wicker Man. Your name's Blake, right? What do you think about joining the Undersiders?"


End file.
